Caching Content Placement and Beamforming Co-design for IRS-Aided MIMO Systems with Imperfect CSI

When offloading links encounter deep fading and obstruction, edge caching cannot fully enhance wireless network performance and improve the QoS of edge nodes, as it fails to effectively reduce backhaul burden. The emerging technology of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) compensates for this disadvantage by creating a smart and reconfigurable wireless environment. Subsequently, we jointly design content placement and active/passive beamforming to minimize network costs under imperfect channel state information (CSI) in the IRS-oriented edge caching system. This minimization problem is decomposed into two subproblems. The content placement subproblem is addressed by applying KKT optimality conditions. We then develop the alternating optimization method to resolve precoder and reflection beamforming. Specifically, we reduce transmission power by first fixing the phase shift, reducing the problem to a convex one relative to the precoder, which is solved through convex optimization. Next, we fix the precoder and resolve the resulting reflection beamforming problem using the penalty convex-concave procedure (CCP) method. Results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms uniform caching and random phase approaches in reducing transmission power and saving network costs. Eventually, the proposed approach offers potential improvements in the caching optimization and transmission robustness of wireless communication with imperfect CSI.